This invention relates generally to land mobile radios, and more particularly, to a system for providing land mobile radio (LMR) services using multiple LMR communication protocols.
Land mobile radios may be used to provide communication between different mobile units, for example, land mobile radios in different vehicles. Land mobile radio band communication, for example, public safety radio communication (e.g., police, fire department, etc.) is generally available within the VHF, UHF, 700 MHz and 800 MHz frequency bands. Part of each of these frequency bands is allocated by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for public safety communication services and are also referred to as Public Safety Frequency Bands. These communications also may be provided using private land mobile radio services (PLMRS).
Traditionally, LMR networks have been used to provide mission critical applications such as public safety communications. In addition to providing a very high level of system availability, LMR networks are designed to support PTT services, such as a dispatch mode of operation. These LMR systems use specialized LMR airlink protocols to communicate wirelessly between LMR radios and the LMR infrastructure.
Known LMR systems use a single protocol for the various layers in the communication protocol stack. For example, the same protocol must be used for both a transport layer and an application layer of the protocol stack. Further, when trying to interconnect multiple systems, with each system using a different protocol, transcoding and trascryption of the communicated LMR content is needed. Thus, design of these systems may result in sub-optimal performance and the cost of these systems may be increased.